Buckle up: this will be a long post but a juicy one as it’s the distillation of a year’s worth of experience traveling around the world while working remotely.

I spent the past year as a participant on a program called Remote Year which is essentially a “nomadic working as a service” adventure tour company. Our program ended two weeks ago and I’ve had enough time now to process the experience. I’ll share my thoughts here on the experience for anyone curious or potentially interested in doing it themselves.

Quantitative stats

First off let’s look at the year quantitatively examining some stats:

I walked/ran an average of 4mi/day over the past year for a total of 1460mi on foot and averaged 9,231 steps/day for a total of 3,369,315 steps.

I visited a total of 52 cities, 16 countries, 4 continents and met countless locals from each place.

Total travel distance = incalculable with all the side trips but you could connect the dots on the above to get a feel for it.

Spending-wise here in full transparency are my expenses for the past year ($2k of each month went directly to Remote Year):

and here are those expenses for the year broken out by category:

Uncategorized = Cash/ATM and Travel includes the $27k to RY + travel expenses from side trips.

I won’t cite income but job performance-wise I had a banner year for sales at Pagely and was nearly able to hit our aggressive goal of doubling our revenue during this period.

It’s been a good year by the numbers but a better one by more difficult to quantify “quality of life” standards.

Qualitative analysis

The most common question I get (aside from “Which was your favorite place?”) is “How do you think you’ve changed?” Honestly at the age of forty-two my character traits are fairly well-baked at this point and I can’t say that I’ve fundamentally changed personality-wise from this experience. That said, I am different from when I started. In a lot of ways this past year has been like weight lifting for developing virtues. Traits like tolerance, patience, humility, empathy, gratitude, presence, resilience and adaptiveness are the ones that come to mind. I believe this type of roving remote working arrangement also gives a knowledge worker much of the benefit in terms of revitalization you’d get from a sabbatical while simultaneously (and counter-intuitively) enabling one’s best work. I’ve experienced a very real revival of my creativity – more on that in a bit…

Deconstructing the benefits

I tallied my average monthly sales numbers over the past year and compared them to my year prior with Pagely. Here is that graph:
We’re a privately-held company and therefore I can’t share financials but you can see from the graph above I was able to realize a 70% increase in my average monthly revenue over the course of the year. People have asked, “To what do you attribute that improvement?” I spoke about this some in my PressNomics talk but I believe it’s the confluence of a couple things. We’re in process of publishing a thought leadership piece for Pagely (which I will link when it’s live) so I won’t steal that thunder here but I believe it was a combination of having the “whitespace” and creative stimulation of being in these unique places constantly surrounded by novel challenges that gave me the room and inspiration to be more strategic on a project like Leviathan. The timezone offset I believe actually worked to our advantage while I was in Europe and Africa. And I think a decent chunk of the overall improvement can be attributed to things that have nothing to do with Remote Year (our average deal sizes have improved as we raised prices, our sales process is becoming more systematized, we have a marketing department and I have a SDR qualifying and appointment setting now, etc).

Other theories I have on what is happening

Kathy Sierra did a post back in the day to the effect of “If you feel your cubicle is rotting your brain, it probably is.” She then referenced research that indicates that environments devoid of stimulation and high in stress inhibit neurogenesis and that conversely, high-stimulation low-stress environments boost it. I had a brush with a job like that briefly back in 2003 and it scared the shit out of me. There’s evidence to suggest that at a neural level working in this way is beneficial to the brain. There’s no way for me to prove this is true but anecdotally I’ve been far happier working this way than when I was working out of my apartment in Phoenix.

The other thing that’s hard to prove but that’s a theory of mine is that I believe humans carry “primal imprints” or hardwired traits that are the result of having evolved for years living in tribes. On an evolutionary scale it’s only very recently that we’ve adopted the social structure of our current society. In my Junction talk in London I made the argument that our Remote Year group operates as a modern day tribe in every sense. I believe returning to a tribe-like structure, as weird as it sounds, has accounted for some portion of the improved happiness for me this past year. In the same way that I believe gardening where you’re kneading your hands through soil can unlock a primal connectedness to our past, traveling and working this way as a tribe returns us to a familiar social structure in which we’re more evolutionarily adapted to function optimally.

The Dynamics of our Group

We started the year with 75 participants and ended with 50. Here are the 50 who finished on our last night together:

Those 25 that left did so for various reasons: some preferred solo travel to this group travel, some had issues arise at work that demanded they return, some lost the jobs or started new ones in the States and others just weren’t feeling it and wanted to go home. My primary impetus for joining Remote Year was because I had wanted to try this type of working travel originally via a US roadtrip but the more I investigated what was involved, the more I realized this type of solo travel would preclude me from being effective, there was simply too much overhead involved in coordinating the next destination while en route and trying to be effective on the road. I pulled the trigger on RY because it solved all those logistical overhead issues but what I’ve learned over the past year is that while the perceived value prop was solving these logistical issues, the true value prop that kept me involved was the communal bond we developed amongst our group. I’m sure everyone thinks their group is special but we had upwards of 20 Remote Year staff fly in to attend our farewell event. If that staff presence is any indication our Darien group was truly something special amongst other Remote Year cohorts.

If I had to pick three nouns to describe the salient qualities of our group they would be “generosity, inclusiveness and initiative.” Our crew exhibited these qualities and really came together over the course of the past year to “level up” each other. I don’t have any hard figures here but on any given weekend someone was organizing a side trip and leaving an open invitation or putting together a trivia night or a movie showing or a wine tasting or jam session. I completely underestimated the value of this fabric going into it. It’s the single best thing that came out of everything that happened this past year. I formed a number of friendships which I imagine will be life-long and people in our crew have already organized long-term and near-term reunions. Words won’t do justice to the fabric of our group but a couple talented visual story tellers from our group have put together videos that do:

Chris Peloquin’s tribute video:

Eddie Contento’s tribute vid:

Rob Price photo poetry montage:

Kelly Tappel’s one second per day video:

What’s next for Sean?

I’m currently in Santiago Chile staying for another week. We had a handful of holdouts from our group stay after everyone else left to continue traveling. I just said goodbye to the last two other holdouts from our group tonight and I’m the lone Darien now in South America as far as I know. I’m planning to do some solo travel up through Costa Rica and Dominican Republic before heading back to the wedding of our former drummer in Seattle in August. My current plan (provided I’m not exhausted at that point) is to bounce directly back out to Europe for summer and ultimately plant in Mexico City around late October for winter. There are substantial tax benefits to staying outside of the US indefinitely once you build up a year of contiguous travel abroad (research the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion) and I’m not yet ready to return home to the US. One of the ulterior motives of my travel at this point is to scout alternate places I might potentially want to live and gain citizenship. Of the places we’ve been I felt most connected to Lisbon, CDMX, Medellin and Buenos Aires.

Work-wise I’m committed to staying with Pagely to see them through this chapter whatever that involves. I suspect given our rate of growth and dominance at the high end of the managed WordPress hosting space we’ll at some point be courted for acquisition and I intend to stay as long as my CEO and COO stay onboard. I’ve been spending some spare cycles helping the Proyecto Caraya charity we helped as a part of our last Charity Makeover move their cause forward. At this point that project is a labor of love but also an experiment to see whether the baton on Charity Makeover events can be passed in succession to subsequent Remote Year groups that pass through Cordoba City. Ideally I’d love to some day put a model behind that effort and grow it to be a phenomenon like Startup Weekend. As far as what I would do once Pagely runs its course, I plan to take a break and explore Asia following Pagely. I developed feelings for someone during the course of this trip and who knows at this point given how terrible I am at conveying feelings but it would be amazing to travel Asia with her following Pagely’s exit. Due to the business hour offset, visiting there while working for Pagely will likely be preclusive. I have some ideas for implementing various passive-recurring revenue-generating projects that play to my core skills and involve streamlining foreign investments in domestic US real estate. My ultimate goal consistent with my Why is to create a venture capital firm under the brand Grid7 that places the entrepreneur at the center. I believe there is opportunity to fundamentally rethink some disciplines as mature as Accounting and Finance to account for other dimensions of happiness, congruence, environmental impact and other variables to better align capitalistic incentives with what the world needs.

In my decompression phase of solo travel I’m intending to build some skill Kite Surfing, complete the Reforge Growth series I started, master the Ableton music DAW, and deepen my Headspace practice. When I finally plant somewhere after Europe I plan to seek out the best local Krav Maga instructor and resume my practice in that self-defensive art. Our first sales person for Pagely starts tomorrow and while I’ve enjoyed being front line sales learning and systematizing our process I’m excited for this move to extricate myself from that role and take on more of a VP of Sales role in building out our sales force, automating pieces which can be and growing & supporting our team to meet Pagely’s 2017 revenue goals.

Feedback for Remote Year

It’s crazy we were Remote Year’s fourth cohort and today they have eleven at varying phases. When we started the RY original group still hadn’t yet finished. Fast forward and they’ve now raised $12MM in venture capital and have been on a growth tear now up over 100 employees.

Today it’s a fantastic v1 platform to enable this type of travel and development and IMO was worth every penny I paid for the service. Having met and befriended both founders (assuming Sam and Greg remain in control of the board) I have high hopes that it will continue on its success trajectory. That said, $12MM is a lot of money to raise and their investors must be expecting a $120MM exit which requires a huge market and story, one that I don’t believe is supported by the present incantation of the program. IMO their way forward is to build the mobile app that knits together everything currently handled via silo’d sources and provides a hub of communication for their groups. Once they have a working version that serves current RY clients, open up a diluted version to the mass market of location-independent workers to make some of this info accessible to them. That gives them a far bigger story making them the “AirBnb of Nomadic Working,” gives them a high-volume, low-dollar service they can sell which also serves as leadgen for their higher-dollar current offering. I was fortunate to hang out with the RY digital team across various cities and they have a small capable and enlightened team so this is doable provided they expand that team.

The other obvious move for Remote Year is the real estate play in each of its cities. They’ve already built and purchased workspaces in Split and Lisbon respectively so they’re clearly thinking down this path as well. Once their pipeline can reliably generate a new group each month and they’re now juggling cohorts across a network of cities where they can keep accommodations and workspaces occupied it’s likely a no-brainer for them to buy vs. rent. IMO they don’t use the capital they raised for that. They would be better served crowdfunding that effort or treating them as independent REITs and finding private investors to finance those purchases. They should have a good idea of attrition and vacancy numbers by that point and with the program I suggested as a “re-oxygenation” of the group whereby current participants can vouch for friends to bring in at intervals to fill vacant program slots, I would imagine this becomes a hugely safe bet for investors.

I would love to see Remote Year bake in some personal and professional development content to their program. They’ve got bigger fish to fry for the time being but for v2 of their platform I’d love to see programs like Simon Sinek “Start With Why” added to the program. I’ve talked with a number of Remotes about how they would adapt the offering and the consensus is that it was pretty on-point for what it strives to be currently. The most common complaint was that they occasionally skimped on accommodations (likely to preserve margins). I had mostly decent accommodations with maybe only one or two cities where it’s not somewhere I would have lived by choice, but I took that as part of the experience and understand that RY is a business like any business and needs to make a profit in order to be sustainable. Overall I’m extremely satisfied with the experience and their receptiveness to feedback at every level. If anything the line blurred many times with our relationship to Remote Year staff and group members as we viewed them as colleagues instead of staff.

Final thoughts

Contrary to my writing style I’m not a hugely analytical person. I’m a creative person and a teacher by nature but I tend to try and distill things to tangible takeaways for this blog. The final week of Remote Year was an intensely emotional one. We had a group that had become extremely close with a ticking clock on this social experiment that we knew was winding to a close. Our final meal together was a brunch on the last day and I found myself sleep deprived and at a loss for words overcome by emotion in hugging people goodbye.
I’ll post my farewell Slack message to our group below as it captures some of those feelings:

******************************Warning: long sappy message from Sean coming… TLDR; I <3 you guys.

I hope everyone has gotten (or is process of getting) home safely. I’ve had a day to process yesterday and sleep and just wanted to say a few words while it’s all fresh.

Sorry for ducking out early on the final brunch. I feel like we’ve been successfully staving off sad emotions with a week-long going away party celebration. The tribute videos from Rob, Eddie and Chris got me a bit on Monday night but the levy that was keeping these big emotions at bay fully broke yesterday as I was hugging people at brunch. I walked to my AirBnb and two songs that have been in my spotify rotation this month played in sequence and for the first time I allowed these emotions to sweep through. I typically process things through music and I don’t know if these two songs will have the same effect for you but next time you’re somewhere alone and in a headspace for this, I invite you to listen to these tracks back to back and let that wave hit you squarely in the chest and stay with it. Listen in this order if you do this exercise and let the images of all the incredible things we’ve done this past year play like a movie reel in your head:

The fate to lose
and forge ahead.
through the burden,
through the death.
The howling
and humble hearts.
know the answers,
find the rest.

Apparently a crystal sea
winds into my hands.
But when I breathe,
all I see
melts into the sand
So I’ll be letting go now.

This one ^ captures the mix of emotions from closing the chapter that was this adventure: 1 part grief saying bye to each other, 2 parts reflection and nostalgia, 2 parts peace and 100 parts sheer gratitude for the rare opportunity we’ve all had in this experience… the people, the places and the void of material things. Valencia Project shirts never lie ;-)

Consider this: a direct quote from Tony Robbins (regardless of what you think of him, this is powerful):

Gratitude is the antidote to the things that mess us up. You can’t be angry and grateful simultaneously. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously. So, gratitude is the solution to both anger and fear, and instead of just acting grateful, I think of specific situations that I’m grateful for, little ones and big ones. I do it every single day, and I step into those moments and I feel the gratitude and the aliveness.

If you feel a wave of gratitude sweep through you, sit with it. Remember it. Let it permeate your being and overflow the cup that normally accumulates other negative emotions. And try to do that going forward.

ok chapter closed… what next?

Door’s wide open
You know what were saying ’bout us now
He’s a legend
I’m a legend
And we both go tripping through the door
Set sail!

This one ^ to me captures the emotions of hopefulness and promise as we all sail off in our different directions to open our respective next chapters. We are all legends guys. This year has changed each of us in magical ways. I believe know that we will go on to do amazing things and change the world in positive ways. So grateful for this family, the support system and strength that exists in it. Use the support system as you need it and let’s be there for each other like the tribe we have become. I love you guys and I look forward to the inevitable reunions we will surely have around the world. See you on the road.

******************************

My PressNomics talk on Remote Work had some of those same emotions towards the end. I realize I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to have this experience and I’ve done my best to capture and share that here with friends and family. I faithfully did a blog post, video and photo album for each city. Those are linked below:

If you’re considering doing Remote Year I encourage you to talk with a handful of the people who have done it. Everyone’s experience will be different and by gaining enough sample size you’ll have a good cross section of views on this program. To me, this type of extended cultural exploration and ambassadorship has awakened me in wonderful ways. The fact that we’ve been able to be good ambassadors for our culture in these places and forge friendships with locals that I can now go back and visit one day is the icing on this cake. This type of one-on-one bridge building I believe is the antidote to hate, fear and all the negative stereotype reactions that accrue amongst cultures fed by calculated media propaganda designed to keep us fighting each other.

If you watch only one 3min video today, take a minute and watch this:

It’s career wisdom from an ex-CIA operative and it’s the crux of how we develop tolerance and unravel the deep cross-cultural vendettas that plague our future.

Lastly, I’m not religious and don’t even consider myself spiritual but I do believe the universe has a symmetry and unknowable karmic forces that hold it together. Call this what you want but this song to me is an ask of the universe to watch over our group of travelers as they disburse across the globe and go on to open their next respective chapters.

Peace.

Hiking Huyana Picchu, Peru

PS. if you would like to receive a quarterly email update from me with a distillation of all my learnings from the previous quarter, add your email below:

Bomba de Tiempo – A percussive show they do every Monday night in BA in this outdoor concert area. It’s like the musical STOMP in that you can’t help but get sucked into the rhythm of this thing. It’s all improv and they have an “orchestra conductor” steering things and making music on the fly. Incredibly cool.

Fuerza Bruta – is an immersive, raucous musical/arts assault on the senses. It reminded me of Blue Man Group in that you’re in the middle of the action and there’s just chaotic craziness happening all around you. Apparently this is an Argentina-borne show that has made it to the US. Highly recommend.

Cirque du Soleil – this was my first Cirque experience and it was amazing. It’s a mix of music, tumbling, juggling, trapeze acts, real-time sand painting… just a crazy hodgepodge of impressive human feats really all set to music. It made me rediscover the band Soda Stereo (I had heard them way back in the day in Ecuador but had forgotten how good they are).

Charity Makeover – Merakis (the group following us, Darien) stepped up their game and successfully completed the first ever handoff of a Charity Makeover initiative started by our group. This blog post is a good recap of what we did for Proyecto Caraya in April and Merakis came in on our heels and advanced their cause by translating the site to Spanish and Portuguese, building out testimonial functionality for volunteers but most importantly, laying the technical groundwork for us to be able to do the contest we envision running across the Remote Year Nation to seed pledges for these guys and jumpstart their fundraising.

Our farewell party was pretty hard to top here. Huge shoutout to the Hussinecka guys for creating an unforgettable going-away party experience that melded experiences from all the cities over the past year into a progressive party night.

I’m now in Mendoza, Argentina wine tasting for the weekend before bouncing over to Santiago & Val Paraiso, Chile. I’m intending to head up to Costa Rica and spend 2 weeks there before heading to Dominican Republic in July where I plan to kite surf with my buddy Keith all month.

Gear recs

Only two this month:

This universal power adapter has come in really handy this month. I thought we were good for the rest of South America on not needing any special power conditioning but the outlets here have slanted plugs. Fortunately I kept my adapter and this thing has worked like a charm. Note: it’s not a converter, only an adapter so it’s assuming you have 220v power and just need to change the shape of your plug. If you go somewhere where the voltage is different you’ll want to get a power converter to transform the voltage.

These little laundry soap pods are super useful if you’re doing your own laundry on the road. Rather than buying powder soap or a bottle of liquid soap you can keep these in your bag and just toss one in when it’s time to do wash. I had never seen these before but a guy in one of the laundromats turned me onto these things and they’ve been useful.

Music

Here is the soundtrack to this month.

This was a particularly emotional month as you might imagine in saying goodbye to 50 people many of whom I’ve become close with over the last year of travel together. I’ll write a longer post where I unpack all the emotions and takeaways from this past year. For now it’s pretty amazing to have completed this year-long journey. Thanks to all who have made this past year possible. I’ll write more soon in an introspective wrap-up post for the year.

Overall I’ve had a really productive month in Córdoba. Last month was previously my all-time best sales month for Pagely and I just beat it this month. Córdoba is a college town with not a ton of cultural stuff but an active nightlife scene. Highlights of stuff we did this month included:

Learning how to grow miniature aromatic herb gardens in an urban setting then incorporate those in making exotic cocktails.

Learning how to make empanadas from scratch at a house in the countryside.

Visiting the Umepay commune in the countryside outside of Córdoba and learning how to make vegan beet ice cream (amongst other culinary creations).

Leading a “Start With Why” workshop at the Junction event and getting awesome insights from 14 of my fellow Remotes.

And my favorite, visiting the Proyecto Caraya monkey sanctuary to gather content before our Charity Makeover event for them last weekend. They had no site prior to last Saturday and 14 of us volunteered an entire day to work together to build them a crowdfunding site and remake their digital presence from scratch. We were also able to implement some basic accounting processes and a CRM system for them to streamline how they recruit volunteers and manage communications with donors and on-premise visitors. Read about how we changed the game for them in a day and watch the video Eddie made for them that tells their story in 1min below:

Work update

Work-wise as I mentioned our small sales & marketing team at Pagely killed it this month. We’re firing on all cylinders with Rod ramping up lead flow, Chad doing qualifying and appointment setting, myself conducting sales calls with prospects and Kirill taking the handoff on new customers to ensure successful onboarding. The big news is that I have approval to recruit someone to replace me in the capacity of sales person so I can move up stack into a VP of Sales role and focus on growing and supporting our sales force while placing more emphasis on refining and expanding the Leviathan automated sales followup AI I created. The prerequisite to this change is me reworking our comp plan to account for everything we’ve learned in v1 and make it support our revenue objective for this year.

Gear recs

As far as gear I’m liking this month, I’ve gotten exceptional value from these items:

These in-ear noise-cancelling headphones are awesome. The workspace this month was nice but it was particularly noisey. With these headphones though I’m able to switch from my normal Apple earbuds and it’s like having ear plugs in that also play music.The bass output on these is just fantastic and at $24 for a pair they’re an incredibly good value. It’s nice to know you always have the capability to zone out and work effectively wherever you are despite a noisy environment.

This multi tool has come in handy a few times this month. It’s basically a half-sized Leatherman and has everything you might need with a screwdriver, a blade, can opener, leather punch, etc.

Simple zip ties actually make great ad hoc luggage locks. I consolidated down to just my hiking pack earlier this month when I was back home in Phoenix but unfortuantely left my luggage lock on the bag I shed. I had brought large zip ties though and these are arguably just as good as a deterrent for keeping would-be thieves from rummaging through your bags while in transit (especially now that all TSA-friendly locks are compromised now that someone uploaded the CAD file to 3D-print the master key).

Music-wise these are some of the songs that will forever remind me of this month:

I don’t know that I’d want to live in Córdoba for an extended period but the visit was entirely worth it just to meet Mayu and be able to run a Charity Makeover to help their monkey sanctuary. When you have a minute hop over to their new site we built and check out the monkeys. For just $5 you can sponsor one of these little guys and feed him/her for a week!

True to the Charity Makeover mission of “teach a person to fish vs. give a person a fish,” part of the goal in this project is to test the concept of a “revolving door Charity Makeover” wherein we leverage the RY flow of talented knowledge workers and pass the baton on what we started to the next Remote Year group. We’ve already intro’d the Meraki’s (group who is following us entering into Córdoba today) program leader to Mayu. We’ve tee’d up an amazing roadmap for them, documented processes and vision and used collaborative tools like Trello, Slack and Google Drive to make it possible to more easily advance the vision we set and build on the foundation we laid. I’m hopeful they will fall in love with Mayu and the project as much as we did and this will become a tradition amongst future RY groups in Córdoba. There are 10 in all coming over the next year – given what we’ve queued up I’m optimistic this could change the game for them in the long-term. If our revolving pilot program with Caraya goes well, Charity Makeover is something I’d be keen to throw myself into full-force once my work for Pagely is done.

As I said in the video this wasn’t one of my top cities. It has amazing food and our workspace was probably the best one we’ve had in our ten months on the road but I never felt at home in Lima.

Machu Picchu is worth the trip alone however. This is one of (if not the) most magical places I’ve ever been. Eleven of the guys in our group hiked 4 days along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and then some of us climbed to the top of Huayna Picchu. Bucket list item #367- check!

The honking in Lima is relentless. It’s funny that some people in our group who were originally from big cities seemed to like it. I guess it’s what you grew up on but it’s what I would call a “vindictive horn culture.” People just lay on their horns out of spite and it really grinds your nerves after awhile.

If you do go to Machu Picchu be sure to spend at least 2 days acclimating in Cusco. We came from sea level to 11,550ft and the altitude kicked my ass. I had even lived in Quito, Ecuador previously at 9k’ but the abrupt change was too much. Very humbling.

If you don’t do well in humidity you’ll want to make sure you have a fan if you visit. Fortunately our apartments all had fans (none had AC and AC is very rare in Lima). Unfortunately my first apartment had mold and I’m still now kicking the cough I acquired after we moved in.

I was lucky to interviewed and featured this last week on the Remote Year site. In it we talk about the backstory that led me to this program, how it’s worked out with doing my job from the road, gear recommendations, travel hacks and more.

No new gear recs this month. Hard to believe our tribe will be disbanding two months from now… Get fired up for the first Charity Makeover in awhile in Cordoba on Apr 22nd. More details coming soon.

Medellin is a fantastic city and is on a short list of places I could/may live after Remote Year.

Starting this month I’m no longer trying to dissect what I like/dislike about the places we go. I explain the rationale a bit more in the video but it’s basically for the same reasons Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink argues that it’s actually counterproductive when you seek to analyze vs. go with gut, “thin slicing” on instinctual decisions.

Leviathan is a reality for Pagely at last. That was definitely my single biggest work accomplishment this month and in spite of having the worst sales numbers in over a year and a half for Pagely, this will be an incredibly valuable contribution to the company. The video explains more.

Starting this month and every remaining month of RY hereafter I’m going to focus on sharing a look at some of the other incredible human beings I’m traveling with. Up this month Nick Fico and Jess S. Strongly encourage you to read both their blogs- incredible people in their own way.

We’re now in Lima, Peru for the month of March and I’m looking forward to ceviche, hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu and focusing on getting back into a running routine. I fly back to AZ end of this month for an awards ceremony for my Dad, to speak at Pressnomics and to attend one of my good friend’s weddings. I’ll rejoin the group the 2nd week of April down in Cordoba, Argentina.

Finally, here are a few of the songs from this month that will forever remind me of our time in Medellin. Adios Colombia, I’ll definitely be back.

We had two awesome city managers, Luis and Cata. Can’t say thanks enough for all they did to make us feel welcome in Bogotá.

There are so many perros in the city. We lived right next to Parque Virrey and it’s bustling every day with all kinds of dogs. So cool.

The altitude is definitely noticeable at 8,600+ feet. I’m sitting now in a taco joint in Medellin which is a substantially lower altitude and I feel like I can breathe again.

Colombia is a huge country. I spent the first two weeks of Bogotá traveling all over the country and we only scratched the surface- didn’t realize how huge this country is.

I don’t know why they don’t believe in toilet seats. It’s just weird.

8 cities down, 4 more to go… can’t believe we’re 2/3rds the way through this adventure. The regular conversation now is “what are you doing after RY?” and I feel like most of us don’t know the answer at this point. Will be an interesting next few months as plans start to crystalize.

I know a couple people this month who were a bit depressed (the term “altitude sadness” was coined by one). While I didn’t personally hit those same blues in Bogotá (Valencia was that way for me) I can certainly respect that some people are starting to hit a wall in month 8. Medellin is a welcome change and I think will inject some literal fresh air in our lungs and reinvigorate some.

Gear shout outs

Three pieces of gear this month merit a shoutout:

I picked up a Michael Kors down puffy jacket at Macy’s in a Christmas sale for $100 and it’s probably my single favorite purchase this past year. It compresses down to about the size of a tennis ball can and is super warm. I treated it with Scotchgard as well as Permetherin before leaving the States so now it’s both waterproof and mosquito proof. Highly recommend it. They have it for the same price on Amazon here.

The Amazon Firestick has been a gem on this trip. It performs the same function of an Apple TV giving you apps like Netflix and Spotify on any TV that supports HDMI but it’s 1/4 the size of an Apple TV and just plugs into the back of the TV. There’s a mobile app you can use as a remote. It’s so nice to be able to throw on background music when you’re working at home or to veg out and watch a Netflix when you’re feeling like a hermit. The voice remote feature is really cool too- you can say “play Miles Davis” and it’ll immediately start playing Miles Davis jazz tunes via Amazon Music… pretty incredible.

TRX. This is a resistance training apparatus that let’s you use your own body weight to perform a number of exercises. It’s been my preferred way to stay in shape this past eight months and while we’ve been doing it all along I came to really appreciate it Bogotá. I normally do it outside but there was quite a bit of rain this month so I started using the attachment that comes with it that allows you to hang it off a door inside. It’s about the size of a softball when stored so it travels really well and is more convenient than finding a gym in each city. The basic kit runs $150 on Amazon.